Open Access in the Institutional Repository: Counting the Benefits for the Kelley School of Business – Indianapolis

Note: To mark OA Week 2017, we have invited Julie Burchfield, a graduate student in our Department of Library and Information Science, to share a recent analysis of benefits of the institutional repository to faculty authors. Julie also made a related infographic, available from: https://create.piktochart.com/output/25097275-open-access-scholarworks. [J.O.]

Considerable research has been conducted in an attempt to discover how the opinions of faculty towards open access impact their decision to contribute to open access institutional repositories (Serrano-Vicente, et al. 595, 602). It has been found that faculty participation in open access is motivated by a number of different reasons. One study identified six different “benefit factors” that influence researchers to participate in open access institutional repositories:

accessibility – the ability to make research easy to get to by providing a unique permalink to each work,

publicity – the potential to increase the impact of a work,

trustworthiness – making works readily available to the academic community promotes communal scholarship thus improving quality,

and altruism – the desire to contribute to the body of knowledge (Kim 247).

Another study proposed that the open access institutional repository benefited all researchers by creating an environment in which authors have more copyright control, by providing the occasion for research to have greater visibility, and by presenting increased opportunities for students and other scholars to gain access to scholarship (Kleinman 39-40). Research also suggests that “wider readership and the subsequent potential for increased citations was one of the main reasons faculty favored self-archiving” (Kim 247). Faculty perception of whether or not participation in open access would increase the overall citation count of their research was mixed in one study, with faculty from the social sciences and humanities being more likely than their colleagues in the physical sciences to anticipate an increase in citation count due to open access participation (Serrano-Vicente, et al. 599-600). To increase faculty participation in open access institutional repositories it would be beneficial if libraries could provide bibliometric data which either supports or counters the idea that citation count is impacted by open access participation (Serrano-Vicente, et al. 602).

To determine the impact participation in open access has had on the citation count of scholarly works, I conducted a short citation study of works deposited into IUPUI’s ScholarWorks from faculty within the Kelley School of Business – Indianapolis. I wanted to see if, in fact, these works received an increase in their citation counts. First, a list of current faculty in the Kelley School of Business – Indianapolis was compiled and compared to the list of authors who have contributed articles to ScholarWorks. Only articles whose author was a current member of the faculty at Kelley School of Business – Indianapolis was considered for this analysis (https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/5073). Fifteen current faculty had works available on IUPUI’s ScholarWorks, a total of 42 articles (this number is a total of unique articles as any works with more than one faculty author were only counted once). Seven works were added in 2014, 16 in 2015, 10 in 2016, and nine works in 2017.

To measure citation increases, I searched for each article using Google Scholar to see if the citation count had increased in or after the year it was added to ScholarWorks. Of the 42 articles, 26 showed an increase in the citation count in the year it was added to ScholarWorks or in the year following. For example, the article “The Mutual Impact of Global Strategy and Organizational Learning: Current Themes and Future Directions,” published in 2015 and written by Marjorie A. Lyles, was added to ScholarWorks in June of 2016 (http://hdl.handle.net/1805/9734). According to Google Scholar, the article received one citation in 2015 and one in 2016 but that number jumped to nine citations in 2017, the year following its addition to the IUPUI institutional repository. Another work by Lyles, “Absorptive capacity and mass customization capability” (2015), also added to ScholarWorks in June of 2016, had zero citations in 2015 and two in 2016 (http://hdl.handle.net/1805/9743). By 2017, the citation count had risen to ten.

In addition to increased citation counts, studies have shown that faculty also value the capability of open access institutional repositories to offer rapid dissemination of their research (Kim 247, Serrano-Vicente, et al. 598). As anticipated, ScholarWorks has been able to offer wide and rapid circulation of research -- the previously referred to 42 articles have received a collective count of over 13,555 views and downloads in the past 4 years. The article receiving the most views, “What Does Familiarity Breed? Complexity as a Moderator of Repetition Effects in Advertisement Evaluation” authored by Dena S. Cox and Anthony D. Cox, was originally published in 1988 but posted on ScholarWorks in January of 2015 (http://hdl.handle.net/1805/5616). In less than 3 years, this article has been viewed and/or downloaded a total of 2,249 times. The article “The Mutual Impact of Global Strategy and Organizational Learning: Current Themes and Future Directions” authored by Marjorie A. Lyles and published in 2015, was added to ScholarWorks in June of 2016. In just over one year, this article has been viewed and/or downloaded 1,868 times.

This analysis of the articles contributed to ScholarWorks by the faculty of the Kelley School of Business – Indianapolis supports research claims that works posted in open access institutional repositories do receive an increase in the number of times they are cited by others and, also, that the institutional repository is an exceptional platform for the rapid dissemination of information.